Mysterious Skin

There seems to be a rising tide of stories, both real and fictional, dealing with childhood trauma in the late-1970s/early 1980s, at the hands of irresponsible or downright criminal adults. Only a few weeks ago we had Jonathan Caouette's traumatic scrapbook Tarnation, and into the same category you could put the gut-churning paedophile documentary Capturing the Friedmans.

Now comes this startling drama from Gregg Araki, based on Scott Heim's novel. It's a more lyrical but equally disturbing take on the subject. The story switches between two boys: sporty, good-looking Neil and awkward Brian. Both their lives are tragically shaped by the predations of their baseball coach (Bill Sage), a paedophile, but in starkly different ways. Neil remembers it all vividly, and through his eyes we see the coach's grooming process in excruciating (but not explicit) detail. Brian, meanwhile, has a blank in his memory and a subsequent history of nosebleeds and blackouts.

By the time they are 16, Neil (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has become a petulant local teenage hustler, mature beyond his years but vulnerable beyond his own awareness, as he discovers when he moves to New York. Brian (Brady Corbet) is a haunted geek who is convinced he was abducted by aliens - an explanation that's somehow plausible in the late-1980s climate of paranoia and Aids. Only after a fraught involvement with a fellow abductee does he deduce that Neil is the key to unlocking his past. The boys' reunion is the film's inevitable conclusion, but their experiences along the way are a uniquely warped version of smalltown coming of age. Abuse is too simple a term for what they've been through, and Araki explores and complicates the subject with courageous honesty and ambivalence.

"No one ever made me feel that special," says Neil of his relationship with the coach, which is portrayed less as a traumatic sex crime than a surrealistic play session. The bright, crisp visuals and ethereal score only add to the sense of detachment, although the two lead actors, and the carefully constructed retro landscape around them, ground the film in reality. Gordon-Levitt in particularly gives a physical, uninhibited and affecting performance - it didn't register until afterwards that this was the kid from the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun. It's a powerful, disorienting hallucination of a film - like the boys in question, we're never exactly sure whether it's a harmless daydream or an awful nightmare.